Friday, August 19, 2016

France has a Muslim problem. The problem does not date to
yesterday or even last year

France had been overly generous about admitting foreign
Muslims. Now it has a very large and unruly group of Muslims in its midst.

It has suffered the assassination of journalists at
Charlie Hebdo, the massacre at the Bataclan music hall and the mass murder that took
place in Nice last month. All of the perpetrators of these terrorist attacks
were Muslim. All of them did it in the name of Allah.

French authorities have tried to be resolute. They have
cracked down fiercely on local Muslim agitators and have banned various kinds
of Muslim dress, especially the burqa and other face coverings.

France prides itself on its laicity. It happily accepts
those who wish to practice their religion, but it does not tolerate religions
that wish to supplant the French legal system and to undermine traditional
French culture.

Thus, beginning with the municipal authorities, France has
banned what is called the burkini, a body suit worn by Muslim women who are not
allowed to bathe in more revealing Western garments. One notes that the ban on
the burkini does not, in fact, ban modest bathing suits. The choice is not
between the burkini and the bikini.

The ban has been applauded by the Socialist
prime minister and by several other Socialist ministers. It is not being imposed by some right wing Tea Party patriot.

Needless to say, Western feminists are up in arms about this
inhibition of women’s liberty. Said feminists have never much concerned
themselves with the fate of women in Muslim countries; they have not been
holding marches against honor killing, female genital mutilation, rampant
sexual abuse, stoning adulteresses, wife beatings and jailing rape victims.

About that, feminists and other progressive fellow travelers
have had nothing to say. But, banning the burkini, that was one step too far.
The feminist left has finally decided that modesty is a good thing. In some
contexts at least.

For those who prefer to be informed about French
jurisprudence an article from Le Figaro sums up the case. I will summarize it.

Jean-Louis Harouel explains that the ban is not directed
against the Muslim religion but against political Islam. French law
distinguishes between the two. It allows people to practice their religion but
it does not tolerate a political system that is fomenting a culture war against
Western Civilization and Western values.

Continuing, Harouel takes up an argument made by Bernard
Lewis in his book What Went Wrong? Islam, Lewis pointed out, is distinct from
Christianity in that it does not separate church from state. Lewis explained, and
Harouel also notes, that Christianity renders unto Caesar that which is
Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s. Islam does no such thing. Thus certain
cultural practices are considered a repudiation of French law and custom. Plus
they are symbols of misogyny. Again, I note that they are unacceptable to French
Socialists.

The American left, however, is appalled by the French. In
particular, it believes that it is looking into the abyss of Islamophobia. Keep
in mind, American leftists, beginning with our president, are not at war with
Islam and refuse to believe that Islam is at war with the West. They are
fighting against Islamophobia. They believe that if only we were more tolerant
the Islamist terrorists would not hate us so much.

This
hysteria threatens to further stigmatize and marginalize France’s Muslims at a
time when the country is listing to the Islamophobic right in the wake of a
series of horrific terrorist attacks. And with presidential elections scheduled
for next spring and the right-wing National Front’s popularity on the rise,
French officials and politicians have leapt to support the mayors.

Given that it’s the Times, they had to find a
way to obscure the fact that major Socialist Party officials have signed on to
the ban. If you are the Times, you think that all evil comes from the right. Of
course, if the Socialist ministers are supporting the ban for purely political
reasons, they are cowards.

The Times quotes Socialist officials without, of course,
saying that they are leftists:

Prime
Minister Manuel Valls on Wednesday called the burkini a symptom of “the
enslavement of women” that “is not compatible with the values of France” and
said “the nation must defend itself.” France’s women’s rights minister,
Laurence Rossignol, declared
the burkini “the beach version of the burqa” and said “it has the same
logic: Hide women’s bodies in order to better control them.”

Times columnist Roger Cohen also denounced the ban, but he
fell back on the old canard—namely that women follow Islamic dress codes
because they really, really want to do so:

Often
the choice to wear one has been imposed through forms of male domination
sanctioned by certain readings of Islam and pervasive in societies like Saudi
Arabia, but equally it may reflect a woman’s independently embraced identity.
That is not for officials to decide. Inside the burkini lurk many different
women’s journeys.

Since these women do not have a choice—they follow the rules
or they are killed—it is meaningless to say that this is something they really,
really want. Whatever happened to the freedom to choose?

As it happens the Times is all over this story. Someone
named Amanda Taub adds her own views, because, she knows, better than most,
what it’s really about. If you don’t think so, just ask her.

Or better, ask the experts that she consulted:

Social
scientists say it is also not primarily about protecting Muslim women from
patriarchy, but about protecting France’s non-Muslim majority from having to
confront a changing world: one that requires them to widen their sense of
identity when many would prefer to keep it as it was.

This means: get used to diversity. People from different
cultures do not have to adopt our customs, they can practice their own Sharia
laws. If you do not like it, too bad.

But, can these same people practice honor killings or wife
beatings or marital rape… under the aegis of Sharia Law? Should men be allowed
to have multiple wives and should parents be able to mutilate their daughters’
genitals. And besides, what is the difference between a holy warrior and a
terrorist? Ought we to excuse terrorism, even to call it workplace violence, because
it is acceptable within a certain religious context?

To the feminist mind, banning the burkini is telling women
what they can and cannot do with their bodies. And this means that the West is
just as repressive as Islam when it comes to women’s freedom. One finds it hard
to believe that people can be so afraid to denounce Islamic misogyny that they
excuse it and compare it to the way women are treated in the West.

Are their minds so addled that they cannot make any basic
distinctions? Who would dare tell a Western woman what she can and cannot wear
or what she can or cannot do with her body?

And naturally, feminists whose weakness and cowardice
invites terrorism suggest that the burkini ban is a tool for recruiting
terrorists.

As for Americans defending the ban, we have Louise Mensch,who explains this:

The
argument is made that we must have freedom of religion under the First
Amendment; but I would reply that this freedom is not untrammeled. One cannot
legally practise polygamy. In terms of clothing, one cannot walk around naked;
it’s a public order offence. My view is that the extreme forms of veiling are
hate speech towards women. Even if practised by women as a choice – and often
they may not be – they still constitute hate speech towards other women. It is
false to say that women are not capable of misogyny. In India, very often
mothers-in-law commit horrific and misogynist crimes against daughters-in-law.
Those saying the burquini is free speech seemed angered that a Corsican tourist
exercised his free speech by taking a photo of the woman in the insulting,
disgusting garment. Muslim men tried to hurt him; Corsicans fought back; hence
the ban; a public order offense.

And Mensch adds:

President
Obama will say ‘black lives matter’ and the UK Parliament will tell the Queen
she leads a “rainbow nation” to make a point about gay rights, but this same
President and this same Queen will bow low before, and mourn, respectively, the
King of Saudi Arabia who does not let women vote, work, have parental rights,
or drive in cars; whose nation forced at gunpoint a school of girl children to
burn alive because they would not let them out of the building because they
were “improperly veiled”.

5 comments:

Ban the burqua. Now. Freedom is not absolute. Obama and the Supreme Court proved this by slapping down the Little Sisters of the Poor, who had a true conscience claim. The burqua is indicative of a medieval, retrograde culture. Most retrograde cultures stay where they are. The Islamists are expanding, emigrating. Invading, according to some.

The burqua can also be used as a disguise. It conceals identity. Namely, while the fundamentalists claim it conceals the female form, it really is an article of submission that conceals the female identity. A hijab is distinguished from the burqua because it does not cover the face. It's a headdress, whether cultural or sacred, like the Sikh turban. That said, hijabs and turbans ought not be allowed in the U.S. military. The military is a fighting force, not a social program. You conform. It helps people not get killed. We don't have special units like Gurkhas and Highlanders. Take off your hat, cut your hair, and stand a post.

Celebrate diversity, until there's no unity. This is how a culture and nation dies, subverted from within because people want all their subjective desires with no responsibility to objective standards that create cultural unity. The Islamists are using our freedoms against us, by design. People need to wake up.

It's easy to say "I'm okay, you're okay" to everyone and everything until there is chaos.

By the way, where is Khizr Khan these days? Wondering when he'll have a YouTube channel to teach us all about constitutional law. To my knowledge, no journalist has asked him whether shariah trumps the U.S. Constitution. Where are our intrepid, courageous journalists these days?

If Muslim women are willing to clothe themselves in Hefty yard bags or be beaten, I say let them.

Islam, an ecclesiocracy, will destroy France. Charles Martel (the Hammer) is weeping. Bernard Lewis is smirking. And the oft-pilloried Michel Houellebecq ("Submission") is watching, wrapped in justifiable schadenfreude.